Producer Milton Subotsky — all hail Amicus! — bought the rights to Cat People from RKO and began developing a remake, with the rights going to Universal eventually. Roger Vadim was going to be the director with Alan Ormsby and Bob Clark — all hail Children Shouldn’t Play With Death Things — working on several versions of the script.

Paul Schrader ended up making this, making a movie that is way more sexual — man, understatement of the year — than the film that inspired it.

Irena (Nastassja Kinski) and Paul (Malcolm McDowell) Gallier have been separated since their parents died. He’s now involved in a church in New Orleans and lives with his housekeeper Female (Ruby Dee), but has gone missing.

Of course, panther attacks start happening — look out Lynn Lowry (I Drink Your Blood, The Crazies) — and zoologists Oliver Yates (John Heard), Alice Perrin (Annette O’Toole) and Joe Creigh (Ed Begley Jr.) are on the case. They capture the panther, who Irena finds herself attracted to. If you think that this is the end of the animal and human sexual attraction in this film, well, stay tuned.

Joe ends up getting mauled by the panther, which disappears just as Paul reappears to make a Flowers In the Attic move on his sister. Oh yeah — that’s when we find out that his basement is filled with the remains of people, so everyone thinks the big cat belongs to him.

Oh man — where do we go now? We find out that in the mythology of this movie, any time one of these catpeople do the horizontal mambo with a human they turn into a cat and can only become human again by killing another person. Mama and papa Gallies were siblings because werecats are ancestrally incestuous and — oh yeah — only aardvarking between two catpeople doesn’t cause a transformation. So Paul tries to get with his sister again, just in time for Oliver to save her and her to shoot her brother.

This movie ends in perhaps the most insane way possible. Irena begs to be with her kind, so Paul ties her up and dips the stinger in the honey, as it were, until she transforms back into a panther, at which point he donates her to the zoo.

Holy cow, movies were absolutely insane in 1982. Wow and the soundtrack! Bowie and Giorgio Moroder? You can not get more absolutely 80’s than that. Oh yeah — and another RKO movie was remade in 1982. The Thing. Both failed at the box office, but only one is remembered quite so fondly.

You can get this on blu ray from Shout! Factory.

Despite being 54 years old and already surviving one heart attack, Paul Naschy took on the heavy burden of playing multiple monsters in this film, as he appears as Frankenstein’s Monster, Mr. Hyde, Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, The Devil and the humans Hector and Alex Doriani. Oh yes — and Waldemar Daninsky, El Hombre Lobo!

For a long time, this movie was never officially released. Before the death of one of its producers, it was to have a lavish budget. It’s better than Naschy usually got, which gives him ample time to get into makeup and play multiple roles. It also got better talent, including Howard Vernon (Dr. Orloff!) and Caroline Munro (Starcrash).

Mostly, Naschy plays Hector, a horror actor devoted to living a carnal life that he compares to de Sade, Gilles de Rais, Vlad Tepes and Jack the Ripper. Each night, Vernon brings him a new prostitute and he dresses up in complicated horror makeup. As you do.

Meanwhile, he’s raising his brother’s son Alex (or Adrian, depending on the translation, played by Naschy’s son Sergio Molina) ever since his sibling killed himself. He may have been helped by the fact that his wife was cheating on him with his own brother. And since he overdosed on heroin, Alex is with Hector, yet lost in his own world of monsters, which is where we get to see Daninsky.

Oh and meanwhile again, there’s a priest in love with a servant girl (Munro) who left him in the past. He pays a homeless man to spy on her and bring him back under penalty of her death. And while all that’s going on, a giallo-style killer is offing people on the grounds of Hector’s estate. And beyond all that — so much is happening! — Alex is trying to bring his father back from the dead.

Imagine Godzilla’s Revenge about Universal Monsters but with the budget and insanity of a Naschy movie and you’ll see why I loved this so much.

The end of this movie — I don’t want to give anything away — somehow has an actor known for Jess Franco movies getting treated like a Lucio Fulci character in a conclusion that somehow makes this an Omen ripoff by way of The Beyond‘s running to nowhere conclusion. It is truly the Dagwood sandwich of sleazy horror scum and I — pun intended — wolfed down every bite.

You can watch this on YouTube.

So this rock band, led by a man known only as Tony, comes back to his old college to win back his ex-girl Rosemary, but the band Neowolf gets in the way. Soon, people are turning up dead and yes, werewolves come on the scene. Bark at the moon, indeed.

Director Yvan Gauthier took his name off this, so he’s listed as Alan Smithee.

This is probably the most interesting part of this movie: The sex scene with Rosemary is not actress Heidi Johanningmeier, but a body double hired by producers months after the film wrapped. That happens all the time, except that no body double credit is on the film and Johanningmeier went to the Screen Actors Guild and won her case.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

Once, the Yokai and humans lived in peace, but as humanity grew wiser and more dependent on technology, they started taking the lands of the monsters and wiping them out. Now, the few supernatural creatures left have gone into hiding.

Kibakichi is one of their number, a ronin samurai werewolf who has as much in common with Clint Eastwood’s The Man With No Name as he does with Lon Chaney Jr.’s Larry Talbot.

He finds his way to a town run by demons who have started a gambling den that attracts humans who have no idea that their hosts are hidden behind magic. However, an army of humans who are actively wiping out Yokai are on their way, armed with near-modern weaponry despite the rest of this movie seeming as if it takes place in the feudal era.

This film has pretty much everything I want in one more: blood spraying in geysers, quiet and moody heroes, plenty of monsters and lots of fighting. It pretty much feels like one of those weird NES-era games like Kabuki Quantum Fighter come to life.

Imagine my delight when I learned that there is a sequel. Now who do I talk to about the Wolfguy and Kibakichi crossover?

As you watch this movie, understand the pains that Lon Chaney Jr. had to go through for your entertainment. While the stories got exaggerated over the years, even a portion of their truth is a testament to the actor’s herculean patience. Although the effects improved with each movie, this makeup — which was originally developed for Werewolf of London — took five to six hours to apply and a full hour to remove. There were even “finishing nails” carefully hammered into the skin on the sides of the actor’s hands so that they would remain motionless during the transformation scenes, which took ten hours of Chaney getting makeup, going to set to hold still against a pane of glass, then back for more makeup on a day that stretched to twenty-one hours of work over two days of filing.

Larry Talbot has returned to Wales to make peace with his father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains) and falls for a local girl (Evelyn Ankers, Universal’s “Queen of the B’s”).

During their initial meeting, he buys a silver-headed walking stick decorated with a wolf just to get to talk to her while she works. She tells him that it depicts a werewolf, a fact of life that he learns all about when he defends her friend from an attack and gets bitten on the chest as a result.

Soon, he learns from the fortune teller Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya) that it was her son Bela (Bela Lugosi!) who bit him. Now, he will live up to the poem that is recited several times during this film: “Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night; May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

The funny thing is that poem is not an ancient tale; it was written for the movie by screenwriter Curt Siodmak. He based the chasing of Talbot and his life being thrown upside down on his experiences in post-WW II Germany.

Director George Waggner would go on to direct plenty of TV, including episodes of Batman and Cheyenne.

While this film was a success and Larry Talbott (with Chaney playing him) would return for four more films, the character never appeared in its own direct sequel. Joe Johnston would direct a 2010 remake with Benicio del Toro in the lead role. There was also talk that the character would be played by Dwayne Johnson in the planned Dark Universe and Ryan Gosling in a Blumhouse version of the film.

Most of the legends of werewolves come not from folklore but directly from this film, including a person becoming a werewolf through a bite, the weakness to silver bullets, and werewolves’ and their victims’ hands being marked with pentagrams.

Fun fact: A five-year-old Sam asked every child in his kindergarten class to show their palms, as he had told his teacher that he was doing a magic trick for the class. In truth, he was checking to see if any of them were werewolves.

La Furia del Hombre Lobo is a 1970 Spanish horror film that is the fourth in the saga of werewolf Count Waldemar Daninsky, played as always by Paul Naschy. It was not theatrically released in Europe until 1975, yet an edited U.S. version played on television as early as 1974 as part of the Avco-Embassy’s “Nightmare Theater” package, along with Naschy’s Horror Rises from the Tomb and The Mummy’s Revenge.

For those that care about these things — like me — the other films were Marta, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Night of the Sorcerers, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Bell from Hell, Witches Mountain, Maniac Mansion and The Witch.

This time, Daninsky is a professor who travels to Tibet, only to be bitten by a yeti which seems like not the werewolf origin that you’d expect. He then catches his wife cheating on him, so in a fit of passion, he murders them both before being killed himself. But this being a Spanish horror movie, that’s just the start of the trials that El Hombre Lobo must struggle through.

Daninsky is revived by Dr. Ilona Ellmann (Perla Cristal, The Corruption of Chris Miller), who wants to use him for mind control experiments. Soon, however, our hero learns that she has a basement filled with the corpses of her failed experiments. To make matters even worse, she brings back his ex-wife from the dead and turns her into a werewolf too!

There’s a great alternate title to this movie: Wolfman Never Sleeps. How evocative! That’s the Swedish version that has all of the sex that Franco’s Spain would never allow.

Naschy claimed that director José María Zabalza was a drunk, which may explain how this movie wound up padded with repeat footage from Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror and some stunt double continuity antics that nearly derail this furry film.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime. It’s also coming out on blu ray from Ronin Flix.

Neil Marshall has directed several Game of Thrones stories, as well as the remake of Hellboy. This movie is much better than that one by several dog hairs. It’s the story of a squad of six British soldiers who are on maneuvers when they meet an enemy even more deadly than they are — a werewolf.

Private Lawrence Cooper (Kevin McKidd, Trainspotting) failed his special forces test because he refused to shoot a dog. Now, he’s stuck back with his old unit in the Scottish Highlands for wargames against an SAS team. As soon as they get there, they find the remains of those men and realize that maybe they shouldn’t be here.

Before long, the team’s commander Captain Richard Ryan (Liam Cunningham, The Card Player) reveals that they were here to capture a werewolf alive. What follows are twists, turns, double-crosses and bloody death. It’s a nailbiter and honestly, I don’t want to give much away.

There was talk of a sequel, Dog Soldiers: Fresh Meat, and a prequel, Dog Soldiers: Legacy, but neither ended up being made.

Between references to H.G. Welles, Zulu, The Matrix, Evil Dead, Jurassic Park, The Company of Wolves, The Searchers, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Jaws, Zabriskie Point, A Bridge Too Far, Apocalypse Now, The Shining, Southern Comfort, An American Werewolf In London, Predator, Love, Honor and Obey, Battle Royale, the TV show Spaced (Simon Pegg was almost in this)and Aliens,  this movie is packed with references to other genre favorites. Marshall would later claim, “I think I got completely carried away.”

You can watch this on Pluto.

Matt Cimber is an example of the individuals that I refer to as a nexus point, as he unites so many different films that I end up writing about so often. Blaxpolitation? He made The Candy Tangerine Man and The Black Six. Late 60’s and early 70’s pre-porn revolution sex movies? As Gary Harper, he made The Sexually Liberated Female, He & She and Man & Wife: An Educational Film for Married Adults (an “educational” movie made in Sweden that does have actual intercourse). Strange “it’s kinda, sorta horror”? He made The Witch Who Came from the Sea with cinematographer Dean Cundey. Sword and sorcery? He made Hundra. He was also pivotal in the lives of Pia Zadora (Butterfly) and his wife Jayne Mansfield (Single Room Furnished) and helped create the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.

So when it comes time to write about Italian-style Westerns, it stands to reason that Matt Cimber should have made one of these films as well.

The best reason to watch this movie is Laurene Landon, who has been in more movies on this site than I realized. She was a featured skater in Mark Lester’s Roller Boogie before showing up in the wrestling film …All the Marbles, Full Moon High, America 3000, Maniac Cop, Maniac Cop 2, Wicked Stepmother and in one of the commercials in The Stuff. She was also in Cimber’s Italian-American-Spanish barbarian film Hundra, complete with an Ennio Morricone score, pretty much making it a legitimate Italian film.

Here, she plays the titular blonde half-Native American Yellow Hair, who is out to find the gold of Tortuga and battling numerous outlaws and Mexican soldiers, including her arch-nemesis Colonel Torres. Helping her out is her sidekick the Pecos Kid.

This is a weirdly put-together film, as it starts like a movie serial and ends like one, including crowd noise and cheers as the characters are introduced. Even the final movies are told like a cliffhanger instead of a narrative and the violence is often staccato in nature, with gunshots and people being shot shown numerous times in succession.

While this film seems like it could be one of the kids — seeing as how basic and silly the story is — it’s also filled with plenty of ultraviolence, including people being launched off cliffs, lynched and their heads dipped in hot gold before being lopped off.

How Italian is this movie? Numerous snakes and horses have had to have been hurt making it. That said, it is nowhere near the highpoints of the genre, but I read someone say that if you happened upon this movie when you were a pre-teen on a Saturday afternoon, you’d be obsessed about it as an adult.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.